"This trilingual prodigy was to become a revolutionary writer in her own right, a trailblazing feminist, a lover of literature and a tireless activist on behalf of the poor and oppressed all over the world." Bel Mooney was lost in admiration for Eleanor Marx, whose biography, written by Rachel Holmes, she found to be "gripping"; more surprising is that this review was in the Daily Mail. What Marx desired most, Mooney continued, "was to change the world": Holmes "is an energetically partisan biographer who believes she did … The story … is shot through with the melodrama of the great Victorian novels – a tale of secrets, infidelities, lost letters and legacies, depression, deception and ultimate tragedy." Jeanette Winterson's review in the Daily Telegraph was a five-star rave, with more eye-opening political opinion for a rightwing paper: "the story of this remarkable life is so well told, with a rare combination of pace, verve and scholarship … I doubt the reader will close this brilliant biography unmoved by this extraordinary woman's life and untroubled by the inevitable questions it raises about global capitalism now." The FT's reviewer, Lisa Jardine, meanwhile concluded that "Holmes has given back to us an unforgettable Eleanor Marx."
The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee was described by Theo Tait in the Sunday Times as "a rich and engrossing family saga set in Calcutta and rural West Bengal, mostly during the social upheavals of the late 1960s". But it was a mixed review: "Mukherjee generally convinces, whether he is describing a family argument, labour disputes at a paper factory, or torture at the hands of the Calcutta police." Stylistically, the novel is, however, "distinctly odd … His diction is often wordy and pompous; one suspects that his thesaurus has been well and truly ransacked … one character feels 'puissant like a nocturnal predator' … The Lives of Others reads like the penultimate draft of a really good novel. Yet its saving grace is that it is unfailingly interesting." Patrick Gale in the Independent pinpointed the story in the novel he felt mattered most to the author: "Pursuing the rebel son, Supratik, on a career from 1960s Maoist idealism through brutal murders in the jungle, to scenes of police torture that had this reader sitting protectively on his hands, it is a graphic reminder that the bourgeois Indian culture western readers so readily idealise is sustained at terrible human cost."
"For Americans who pay attention to these things," wrote Iain Dey in the Sunday Times about Timothy Geithner, author of Stress Test, "he was and remains 'Mr Bailout': the man who handed taxpayers' hard-earned cash to bankers … In this generally racy, opinionated if sometimes overdetailed memoir … Geithner aims, just over a year after leaving the Capitol, to set the record straight. And though he pledges in his introduction that 'this won't be an if-only-they-had-listened-to-me memoir', he struggles … – perhaps predictably – to keep that promise." "He's written a really good book – we might as well get that out of the way, as so much else about … Geithner remains unsettled," noted Michael Lewis in the New York Times. But the story he tells "blames everyone and no one. The crisis he describes might just as well have been an act of God.". And yet there's "hardly a moment in Geithner's story when the reader feels he is being anything but straightforward". For Edward Luce in the FT, too much of the "sharply worded and candid memoir", however self-deprecating it may be, "is self-defence … Ultimately, Geithner will be judged by how the system handles the next big crisis."
